Caption: Queen Elizabeth II, right, looks on as the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge chat with King Hussein and Queen Rania of Jordan as guests arrive at a lunch for sovereign monarchs of the world, held in honour of the queen’s Diamond Jubilee, at Windsor Castle, in Windsor, Friday May 18, 2012. Critics are aghast at the choice of some guests for the lunch _ among them a king whose Gulf nation has been engaged in a brutal crackdown on political dissent.(AP Photo/ Arthur Edwards, Pool)

LONDON – Britain has come under criticism for inviting the king of Bahrain, whose Gulf state has engaged in a brutal crackdown on political dissent, to a lunch Friday celebrating Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee.

The lunch in Windsor Castle was the largest gathering of foreign royals in Britain since Queen Elizabeth II’s grandson, Prince William, was married to Kate Middleton last year. Then, as now, the decision to extend an invitation to members of the Bahraini royal family has angered those who are upset by the deadly violence deployed against demonstrators since protests erupted in the Gulf state.

Bahrain’s Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa eventually skipped the royal wedding, saying he didn’t want the controversy to tarnish the couple’s happy day. But on Friday, Buckingham Palace confirmed that his father, King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, attended the queen’s lunch — along with some 45 other royal guests from around the world.

He did not attend a more formal banquet hosted by heir to the throne Prince Charles and his wife Camilla at Buckingham Palace on Friday evening.

Labour lawmaker and former Foreign Office minister Denis MacShane said diplomats should have tried to keep Al Khalifa away from the queen, “rather than expose her to having to dine with a despot.” Republic, the anti-monarchy group, called the lunch invitation “a catastrophic error of judgment” which “seriously damages Britain’s reputation.”

The Foreign Office, which advised Buckingham Palace on the invitations, said that Britain’s ties to Bahrain allowed U.K. officials to talk frankly with the strategic island nation’s rulers about “a range of issues including those where we have concerns.”

Al Khalifa wasn’t the only controversial guest dining at Windsor Castle. Swaziland’s King Mswati III, who is accused of living in luxury while his people go hungry, also attended the lunch. Earlier this week, protesters gathered outside the exclusive London hotel where he was rumoured to be staying with a large entourage.

There wasn’t anything in the way of protest outside Windsor Castle on Friday. Sky News television footage showed a handful of royal supporters clutching red-and-white Bahraini flags.

The Diamond Jubilee marks 60 years of Elizabeth’s reign as Britain’s monarch and is being celebrated around the country with concerts, pageants and military displays. Song writers Andrew Lloyd Webber and Gary Barlow have written a Diamond Jubilee song that will be performed at a celebration concert on June 4.

France’s presidential race headed into its home straight Saturday as ex-IMF boss Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a Socialist once tipped to win the vote, blamed Nicolas Sarkozy for his spectacular downfall.

The claim came as the battle between Sarkozy and the front-running Francois Hollande grew ever more bitter, with the incumbent accusing the Socialist of subjecting him to a “Stalinist trial” over his bid to woo the far right.

Strauss-Kahn, in his first major newspaper interview since his disgrace a year ago, told The Guardian that his fall was orchestrated by opponents to prevent him from standing as the Socialist candidate in the election.

The ex-International Monetary Fund boss had been favoured to win the vote until May last year, when he was arrested in New York and accused of sexually assaulting a hotel maid, Nafissatou Diallo. The charges were later dropped.

Strauss-Kahn said that although he did not believe the incident with Diallo was a setup, the subsequent escalation of the event into a criminal investigation was “shaped by those with a political agenda.”

“Perhaps I was politically naive, but I simply did not believe that they would go that far — I didn’t think they could find anything that could stop me,” Strauss-Kahn told the British daily.

The Guardian said it is clear that the “they” refers to people working for Sarkozy and his UMP party.

Strauss-Kahn accuses the agents of intercepting phone calls and ensuring that Diallo went to the police to make her accusations.

He believes he was under surveillance in the days before the encounter, and had removed encryption from his phones because of technical problems, the interview said.

A New York lawyer representing Diallo in an ongoing civil lawsuit against Strauss-Kahn dismissed as “utter nonsense” that there had been any political intrigue.

Opinion polls show that Hollande is expected to win the election run-off against Sarkozy on May 6.

Strauss-Kahn said he was sure he would now be in Hollande’s shoes had it not been for the events at the Sofitel hotel in Manhattan on May 14 last year.

“I planned to make my formal announcement on 15 June and I had no doubt I would be the candidate of the Socialist Party,” said Strauss-Kahn, who refused to discuss with The Guardian a separate sex scandal that has erupted in France.

Hollande and Sarkozy were expected to call a brief truce later Saturday when both head for a soccer match at the Stade de France in Paris to watch third-tier outsiders Quevilly battle Lyon for the French Cup.

But the gloves have come off in recent days, with Hollande accusing his rival of a “transgression” in his bid to secure the votes of the 6.5 million people who plumped for far-right leader Marine Le Pen in last Sunday’s first round.

Sarkozy has reached out to the former political pariah Le Pen, insisting that her values are not incompatible with France’s republican tradition, and vowing to secure Europe’s borders and fight multiculturalism.

But Hollande is also scrambling to recruit voters who backed the anti-immigrant, anti-European National Front leader.

Le Pen did well in the first round among white working-class voters who might once have backed the left, and on Friday the Socialist candidate made a concession to their concerns.

“In the period of crisis we are going through, limiting economic immigration is necessary and essential,” he said. “I also want to fight illegal immigration on the economic front.”

Sarkozy complained at a rally on Friday in the central city of Dijon that he was being subjected to what amounted to a Stalinist show trial but that all he wanted to do was to “talk to the 6.5 million French who voted Marine Le Pen.”

Le Pen won just short of 18 percent in the first round, not enough to join Hollande or Sarkozy in the run-off but enough to make her supporters a tempting pool of potential second-round voters.

She is not expected to endorse either of the remaining candidates before May 6, and is thought to relish the prospect that a defeat for Sarkozy would leave the centre-right in disarray before legislative elections in June.

Pope Benedict XVI was received by President Felipe Calderon in Del Bajio International Airport, under the nave with open arms to greet the hundreds of parishioners who gathered in the terminal to welcome him. Joseph Ratzinger arrived Friday at the Mexican city of Guanajuato for what will be his three-day visit to this country that performs second to Latin America. The Pope was received by President Felipe Calderon and his wife Margarita Zavala.

The who-knew-what about the real costs of the F-35 fighter jet Canada wants to purchase is worrisome enough. But at the heart of the fiasco is a far more serious concern about what public honesty means to this government.

It’s a sad state that few Canadians appear surprised by the auditor general’s findings that Parliament was kept in the dark over the real costs of this program and what looks to be a $10-billion overrun.

Many seem to assume that misleading and denying whenever it suits is a government’s normal default position. After all, this government seems to have done it for years on Afghanistan and with its other problems in national defence.

In my own attempts to unravel the F-35′s real costs I never once met a single soul outside government and knowledgeable about defence purchases who believed the prime minister’s promise that the planes could be delivered for a bargain-rate $75 million each.

I never met anyone inside the Canadian military who thought so either.

I’m sure thousands in the aviation industry who follow these programs, especially in the U.S. and Europe, simply assumed Ottawa was dealing in fairy tales for public consumption, from which it refused to budge.

This is why we need to see if this current mess is part of a pattern of official “misstatements” on defence matters. If so, we’ve got a serious national problem.

The Afghan adventure

If we look for trends, the Afghanistan mission offers so many of these quicksand moments over direction, policy and costs that it will baffle historians for years. It certainly confused Stephen Harper’s own minister in its day.

Defence Minister Peter McKay in the cockpit of a F-35 Joint Strike Fighter in July 2010. Canada is planing to buy 65 of the new jets from Lockheed Martin, but at what price? (Reuters)Remember when the prime minister was never going to “cut and run” but then suddenly switched 180 degrees to launch the 2008 election with the promise of a full pullout in 2011.

The defence department was stunned, and so was his minister Peter MacKay.

“I don’t know,” MacKay told reporter Murray Brewster when asked how the historic shift came about. “I heard about it the same time you did.”

Military officers were also perplexed when Harper reversed himself again at the Lisbon NATO Summit in 2010 and committed 900 Canadian Forces personnel to stay on in Afghanistan for some years after the pullout on a training mission.

He was under enormous pressure at the time from Washington to help out, and described the training mission as not very risky.

But everyone involved knew that foreign military trainers were fast becoming the new targets of insurgent groups, as the past many months have clearly demonstrated.

Throughout the war, inquiring journalists found our military to have become increasingly secretive and at times even untrustworthy, as National Defence and PMO communications staff snatched control of information away from officers in the field.

For long periods Canadians were denied information on the number of Afghan detainees that Canadian soldiers handled, the tally of firefights our soldiers were involved in, the number of attacks on Canada’s main base in Kandahar, even the full number of our wounded.

What’s more, they were constantly assured the Taliban was being battered into weakness, despite quite contrary evidence.

As for the total cost of the Afghanistan adventure? That was, and remains, as murky as the cost overruns of the F-35 program.

The less said

Even supporters of the war, like leading historians Jack Granatstein and David Bercuson, in their Lessons Learned? study last October revealed horrible mismanagement.

Today that study reads like a primer for the F-35 shambles. We see layer after layer of weak political leadership, jealous bureaucratic infighting, and a complete lack of strategic insight from the top on down.

The prime minister’s office has not only rigorously controlled every aspect of government communications, muting the military’s own voice, but it seemed determined to give Canadians as little information as possible on the war, the study said.

In the historians’ words: “The prime minister may have concluded that the war could not be won, was politically costly and, therefore, the less said of aims and objectives the better.”

The same attitude, of saying as little as possible, seems to have been at play again during this long process over the F-35 purchase, with the government simply refusing to retreat from its predictions that these next-generation jets would cost only $15 billion over a 20-year period.

That is quite a gap from the $25 billion lifetime cost that others, including the parliamentary budget officer (and even some DND officials, the auditor general has now revealed) felt was reasonable.

A history here

When pressed, Harper’s team even denies it has agreed to buy the plane. Yet it was the only warplane ever held up for Canada’s defence needs, while a fresh competition involving other planes was totally ruled out.

I’d like to think our top soldiers would refuse to go along with misleading Parliament. However, the public relations domination of National Defence has been eating away at even some core ethics of our military for some years now. The way it did in the RCMP.

Think of the number of events where misleading stories are put out there. Defence Minister Peter MacKay uses a search-and-rescue training flight to prolong a fishing trip. Any waste is denied, until the media shakes out the details.

Then, as payback, military officials tamely sent over information on opposition members’ flights to the minister’s office, so he could throw these back at his opponents in question period.

There was also the case last fall, when reports leaked out that Chief of Defence Staff Walt Natynczyk had used a government jet to connect to a family vacation in the Caribbean. His staff bitterly complained that he had been set up by “higher ups” in government and it’s widely believed he felt that way too.

Petty? No, it suggests just how much dark infighting is going on between defence and politicians, as the culture of secrecy and even intimidation spreads.

At times, these attempts to mislead can be quite farcical. Like last summer when one of Canada’s four submarines crashed on the ocean floor and the deputy-commander of the navy dismissed the incident as a mere “fender-bender.”

Actually, the hole in the hull was so extensive that the sub commander was relieved of his command and HMCS Corner Brook is not expected back in service until 2016.

We really need to know how deep the deception went in this case. And we ought to be much more curious about what is being carried out in our names under the cloak of secrecy.

About The Author

One of this country’s most experienced journalists and foreign correspondents, Brian Stewart is currently a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Munk School for Global Affairs at the University of Toronto. He also sits on the advisory board of Human Rights Watch Canada. In almost four decades of reporting, he has covered many of the world’s conflicts and reported from 10 war zones, from El Salvador to Beirut and Afghanistan.

There are so many layers of misconduct in the F-35 affair that it is difficult to know where to start. Do we especially deplore the rigging of operational requirements by defence officials to justify a decision that had already been made? Or should we focus on the government’s decision to buy the planes without even seeing the department’s handiwork? Is the scandal that the department deliberatedly understated the cost of the jets, in presentations to Parliament and the public? Or is it that its own internal figures, though they exceeded the published amounts by some $10-billon, were themselves, according to the Auditor General, gross underestimates?

It’s all of those things, of course, and more: a fiasco from top to bottom, combining lapses of professional ethics, ministerial responsibility and democratic accountability into one spectacular illustration of how completely our system of government has gone to hell.

This was, until last year’s shipbuilding contract, the largest single purchase in the country’s history. And yet it was carried out, as we now learn, without proper documentation, without accurate data, and without any of the normal procurement rules being followed. Defence officials simply decided in advance which aircraft they wanted, and that was that. Guidelines were evaded, Parliament was lied to, and in the end the people of Canada were set to purchase planes that may or may not be able to do the job set out for them, years after they were supposed to be delivered, at twice the promised cost.

But of course it’s much worse than that. If department officials played two successive ministers of defence, Gordon O’Connor and Peter MacKay, for fools, the evidence shows they did not have to exert themselves much; if they did not offer evidence to back their claims, whether on performance, costs, or risks, it is because ministers did not think to ask for any. Nor was this negligence confined to the Department of National Defence.

The passage explaining how Public Works was persuaded to sign off on the deal is perhaps the most damning in the Auditor General’s report. Anxious to avoid having to put the purchase out to competitive bids, as is usually the practice, defence officials hit upon the scheme of drafting the requirements in such a way that only the F-35 could meet them — needlessly, as I mentioned, as the government agreed to go ahead with the purchase a month before the requirements were delivered; that is, before they even knew what the planes were supposed to do, let alone whether they could do them.

Nevertheless, at some point in the process somebody at the department of Public Works and Government Services became suspicious of defence’s claims, and alerted their superiors. What kind of documentation did the “senior decision makers” (who they?) at Public Works demand from their defence counterparts? Take it away, Auditor General! “In lieu of a formalized statement of operational requirement or a complete options analysis,” Public Works informed Defence it would go along with the sole-source dodge if it were provided a letter, “confirming National Defence’s requirement for a fifth generation fighter and confirming that the F-35 is the only such aircraft available.” Wait, it gets better: The letter was produced “the same day.” Still better: “There were no other supporting documents.” Still better: “It is important to note that the term ‘fifth generation’ is not a description of an operational requirement.” Stop! You’re killing me!

Whether ministers knew they were peddling the same falsehoods is to some extent beside the point. If they did not know, as the saying goes, they should have. It is plausible that a kind of willful blindness might have set in. If ministers were too willing to believe their officials, it might have been because they liked what they were being told. The Auditor General’s report leaves little doubt why: because of the wealth of “industrial benefits” they were promised (“a driving motivation for participation . . . used extensively as a basis for key decisions . . . briefing materials (placed) particular emphasis on industrial benefits . . . ). This is what comes of allowing pork-barrel politics into decisions that should be guided by only one consideration: getting value for the taxpayers’ money.

But what’s really at issue here is neither duplicitous bureaucrats nor credulous ministers. It is the lack of transparency throughout. If officials kept their ministers in the dark, it is also true that ministers kept Parliament in the dark. Had anyone outside government been allowed to see the requirements, we might have been able to judge whether these were as essential to the defence of the nation as claimed; whether the F-35 was indeed the only plane that could fulfill them, and so on. Had Parliament been given the costing information it demanded, we might have been in a better position to judge who was right, the government or its critics — before the last election, not after. Remember, it was the government’s refusal to provide just this information that was, in part, the reason for the motion of no-confidence that precipitated the election.

So this is also what comes of Parliament’s prerogatives, its powers to hold ministers to account, being ignored or overridden. These aren’t procedural niceties, of concern only to constitutional law professors — “process issues,” as more than one member of the press gallery sneered at the time. They’re the vital bulwarks of self-government, the only means we have of ensuring our wishes are obeyed and our money isn’t wasted. Parliament having long ago lost control of the public purse, it was only a matter of time before the government did as well.

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